As the Internet technology develops, the network resources are becoming richer and richer, and more and more people browse for information on webpages. Today, with technological developments and network advancements, designing a webpage often requires numerous tables to present large quantities of data, and consequently when a data field is very long, the display of a table may be beyond what the computer display screen can display.
With the present webpage designs, when a user browses to this type of a table, the user has to use the dragged scrollbar of the browser to browse. Because of the user habits and issues of the web design technology, the present web browsers nearly never have a horizontal scrollbar. When the data displayed in a table in a webpage has unlimited rows or unlimited columns, for example more than 500 columns, the user will have difficulties to browse such a table. In the field of electronic commerce, tables with unlimited rows and columns are frequently used, and often it is necessary to compare data between different columns. The trading information lists and product information lists of TaoBao.com are examples of such tables.
One solution offered by the present technology is to use divided pages, where each page displays a part of the table information. This method is complicated to use. To compare the data of several columns, the user needs to keep switching back and forth between the pages. This causes low browsing efficiency, requires multiple transmissions of the webpage data, and wastes network resources.
Another solution offered by the present technology is to use embedded tabulation programs. When browsing a table of many rows or columns, the user clicks to call an embedded tabulation program to obtain a relatively satisfying browsing result. An example is disclosed in Chinese patent application No. 02102597.5. Although using embedded tabulation programs may achieve quite satisfying browsing result, the process of calling a tabulation program wastes a great deal of resources for network data transmission and resources of the local computer. Because the complexity of the process to obtain a satisfying browsing effect, the method cannot satisfy the browsing needs of more users, and is further unable to maintain good readability.
Yet another solution offered by the present technology is to set a window on the webpage and embed a table of multiple rows and columns in the window. The user browses the content of the table by scrolling the scrollbar of the window. This method to a certain extent solved the problem of displaying a large table in a small area. However, to perform comparative browsing of the data in the table, the user needs to repetitively drag the scrollbar to find the related data, causing low browsing efficiency.